He started making the gourd with help from his graduate school adviser at North Carolina State University, where he earned an M.S. in applied sociology in 1996. But he didn’t finish the electric gourd instrument for nearly 20 years, as it required him to build and rebuild an electric dulcimer and install it into the hard-skinned fruit.

It wouldn’t be wrong to call the purples rich and the blues bright, or describe his use of ombré, the use of one color gradually blending into another, as tantalizing. Those descriptions wouldn’t be wrong, but they would be reductive. And even if it’s not the first thing you notice, language is what to pay attention to in this show.